The official, who declined to be named, maintained that his team and JPJ are confident they will address all of these queries in time for the Oct 1 deadline.
“Certain users are worried, so they panic and they blame the system. But we will work with them to clear up these concerns,” he added.
Malaysian authorities said that the purpose of the VEP was to tackle car theft and cloning syndicates, and prevent vehicles from leaving the country without paying fines for traffic offences.
Malaysia initially wanted to implement the VEP from October 2019 under then transport minister Liong Tiong Lai. However, the implementation of the scheme has since been delayed several times due to technical issues with the portal and poor implementation at the land checkpoints during a pilot project which resulted in congestion.
DRIVERS UNABLE TO TROUBLESHOOT PROBLEMS
Like Mr Khoo, Singaporean Ben Lee is also unable to apply for a used car he purchased in 2022 for VEP because it was registered under a previous owner in the system.
The 49-year-old, who is in technical sales, is required to drive from Singapore to parts of Malaysia like Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh once every two weeks to meet clients for his job. Therefore resolving the issue is crucial for his work, he said.
“If you look at the history of how Malaysia keeps wanting to implement VEP, but then keeps postponing, it has been a flop, and this time might be a flop again,” said Mr Lee.
He told CNA that he hopes the deadline is extended beyond Oct 1 so that it gives him more time to contact the car’s previous owner.
“They might extend it one more time or maybe not implement it at all,” he added.
Mr Seah Kim Por, a 71-year-old who is operational director for an electronics firm, told CNA that he had applied for a VEP in 2019, and that it was expiring in October 2024.
He told CNA that the JPJ portal did not offer a section for users to renew the VEP application. He has sent multiple emails to JPJ and has not received any response.
“I was one of the few diligent drivers who applied for it back in 2019 and now, because of this, I might have trouble travelling after October,” he added.
“It should be much easier for me to extend it and not be left to worry about this. You want to implement something but don’t want to make it easy for those who already signed up early on,” said Mr Seah.
Another Singaporean facing issues is Ms Nurliyana Salleh, who is a private-hire car driver. The 34-year-old told CNA that she is unable to register her car because it is leased from a rental company.
“I don’t own the car so my rental company has to do it but they have not done so. I’m not sure how to proceed,” she said, adding that she enters Johor Bahru every week.
CNA contacted some rental companies in Singapore to ask whether they would be applying for VEP on behalf of their clients.
Current Leasing, a firm which rents out to private-hire drivers including from regional platform Gojek, told CNA that only 30 per cent of its hirers enter Malaysia, and it added that it plans to work with JPJ to ensure that drivers who need the VEP will not be inconvenienced.
However, general manager of Current Leasing Shaun Lee told CNA that the process for applying has been difficult because the requirements are “neither robust nor versatile” and as a result, the company has been unable to complete the registration process for its fleet.
Mr Lee explained that for instance, JPJ requires that each vehicle be tied to a TouchNGo e-wallet but this is challenging as the company would be encumbered administratively as they would be required to open an e-wallet account for each car.
“This is not practical as it either means we have to create an equal number of e-wallets as the number of vehicles, or we simply use one e-wallet for all cars and risk not knowing how much each vehicle chalked up,” said Mr Lee.
